News about the practice periods at Tassajara and how the consequences of the Basin fires play out over the winter.

Monday, July 7, 2008

Monday morning - July 7th

As some of you have noticed the fire made a little run up to the top of the ridge above Willow Creek yesterday and is now visible from Tassajara. This was the fire moving uphill. To reach Tassajara, the fire must now burn downhill which it should do at a much slower pace. Click on the above image for a Tassajara oriented view of the fire's location. The red and orange dots show where the fire has burned in the past 12 and 24 hours.

We've just had a visit from Jack Froggatt the Branch Commander for this section of the fire. He said that they're going to warn David when they think that the fire is 24hrs away and that his best guess is that it's still 72hrs away. So we all shared a laugh at the 3-day fire which has been 3 days away from Day One.

Jack said that he'd been looking at the fire in the Tassajara Creek drainage this morning and there was very little activity there. He could see 'no smokes' from the leading edge of the fire here. The helicopters have been dropping retardant and water on it and seem to have been able to keep it subdued.

He confirmed that the Willow Creek area is the most active part of the fire approaching Tassajara and that they were hoping to hold the fire above the junction with the Tassajara creek so that the fire didn't approach Tassajara upstream.

On the northern edge of the fire, Jack shared that 5 days ago he didn't think that they would need to back-burn from the dozer lines that extend from Chews Ridge. Now he thinks that they'll be burning from those lines in the next 7-10 days.

The SFZC website is now saying that Tassajara is now closed until July 27th.

1 comment:

Anonymous
said...

On Sunday afternoon Joanne and I had a long conversation with our son Graham who called from Tassajara. Our thoughts have been with everyone in the entire Tassahara community recently and we greatly appreciate your daily updates. Graham is confident that the community is very well prepared, and safe. We only wish that we could send you some of our cool damp Northern Ontario weather.Walter